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the three principles
of html code optimization |
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Just like spring
cleaning a house, the html code of your web pages should
get periodic cleaning as well. Over time, as changes and
updates are made to a web page, the code can become
littered with unnecessary clutter, slowing down page
load times and hurting the efficiency of your web page.
Cluttered html can also seriously impact your search
engine ranking.
This is especially true if you are using a WYSIWYG (What
You See Is What You Get) web design package such as
BlueVoda, FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These programs will speed up
your web site creation, but they are not that efficient
at writing clean html code.
We will be focusing this discussion on the actual html
coding, ignoring other programming languages that may be
used in a page such as JavaScript. In the code examples
I will be using ( and ) characters instead of correct
html so that the code examples will display properly in
this newsletter.
Up until recently when coding a page in html we would be
using tags such as the (font) tag and (p) paragraph
tags. Between these tags would be our page content,
text, images and links. Each time a formatting change
was made on the page new tags were needed with complete
formatting for the new section. More recently we have
gained the ability to use Cascading Style Sheets,
allowing us to write the formatting once and then refer
to that formatting several times within a web page.
In order to speed up page load times we need to have
fewer characters on the page when viewed in an html
editor. Since we really do not want to remove any of our
visible content we need to look to the html code. By
cleaning up this code we can remove characters, thereby
creating a smaller web page that will load html more quickly.
Over time html has changed and we now have many
different ways to do the same thing. An example would be
the code used to show a bold type face. In html we have
two main choices, the (strong) tag and the (b) tag. As
you can see the (strong) tag uses 5 more characters than
the (b) tag, and if we consider the closing tags as well
we see that using the (strong)(/strong) tag pair uses 10
more characters than the cleaner (b)(/b) tag pair.
This is our First Principle of clean html code: Use the
simplest coding method available.
html has the ability of nesting code within other code.
For instance we could have a line with three words where
the middle word was in bold. This could be accomplished
by changing the formatting completely each time the
visible formatting changes. Consider this code: (font
face="times")This(/font) (font
face="times")(strong)BOLD(/strong)(/font) (font
face="times")Word(/font) This takes up 90 characters.
This is very poorly written html and is what you
occasionally will get when using a WYSIWYG editor. Since
the font tags are repeating the same information we
can simply nest the (strong) tags inside the (font)
tags, and better yet use the (b) tag instead of the
(strong) tag. This would give us this code (font
face="times)This (b)BOLD(/b) Word(/font), taking up only
46 characters.
This is our Second Principle of clean html code: Use
nested tags when possible. Be aware that WYSIWYG editors
will frequently update formatting by adding layer after
layer of nested code. So while you are cleaning up the
code look for redundant nested code placed there by your
WYSIWYG editing program.
A big problem with using html tags is that we need to
repeat the tag coding whenever we change the formatting.
The advent of css allows us a great advantage in clean
coding by allowing us to layout the formatting once in a
document, then simply refer to it over and over again.
If we had six paragraphs in a page that switch between
two different types of html formatting, such as headings in
Blue, Bold, Ariel, size 4 and paragraph text in Black,
Times, size 2, using tags we would need to list that
complete formatting each time we make a change.
(font face="Ariel" color="blue" size="4")(b)Our
heading(/b)(/font) (font face="Times color="black"
size="2")Our paragraph(/font) (font face="Ariel"
color="blue" size="4")(b)Our next heading(/b)(/font)
(font face="Times color="black" size="2")Our next
paragraph(/font)
We would then repeat this for each heading and
paragraph, lots of html code.
With css we could create css Styles for each formatting
type, list the Styles once in the Header of the page,
and then simply refer to the Style each time we make a
change.
(head) (style type="text/css") (!-- .style1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight:
bold; font-size: 24px; } .style2 { font-family: "Times
New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; } --)
(/style) (/head) (body) (p class="style1")Heading(/p) (p
class="style2")Paragraph Text(/p) (/body)
Notice that the Styles are created in the Head section
of the page and then simply referenced in the Body
section. As we add more formatting html we would simply
continue to refer to the previously created Styles.
This is our Third Principle of Clean html Code: Use css
styles when ever possible. css has several other
benefits, such as being able to place the css styles in
an external file, thereby reducing the page size even
more, and the ability to quickly update formatting
site-wide by simply updating the external css Style
file.
So with some simple cleaning of your html code you can
easily reduce the file size and make a fast loading,
lean and mean web page. |
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